The Younger Generation: An Apologia

“… non quia crasse
Compositum inlepideve putetur, sed quia nuper.”

— Horace.

I.

The Master-Builder spoke not alone of his own time when he said: ‘Just you see, Doctor, presently the younger generation will come knocking at the door!’ He voiced the eternal dread of displacement, that most terrible tragedy of Age.

Age sometimes seems to see itself surviving in a sort of earthly immortality of influence, an exquisite wraith whose sustenance is human opinion. Like sounds which can vibrate to birth only upon strings of fixed length and thickness, so this influence must find a human organism responsive to itself or it must vanish with the mind which gave it birth. Age desires not to survive only in an epitaph. Age demands that Youth shall be its earthly immortality.

Youth knocks at the door of the House of Life and presents its passport to-day just as it always has; it will enter on its own terms whether the Warder will visé its passport or not. Just as once Youth gave the warm humanity of Euripides when the Warder asked for the sombre majesty of Æschylus; as it gave the vernacular Bible when the Warder demanded the decrees of all the councils; as it gave chemistry and physics and biology when the Warder demanded the classics, so to-day it offers a determined spirit of inquiry instead of loyalty to accepted standards; a broader instead of a more deeply thoughtful intellectual; a more socialized ethics instead of stronger individual virtues.

It is easy to see why Age distrusts us. Broader spaces, fewer interests, beliefs more single, combined with a perhaps not less important inheritance of unmixed blood, gave to an earlier generation in this country a stability, an unbendable quality which stands as one of the supreme monuments to the possibilities of human character. It is little wonder that it hopes for the worst from a generation born of blended racial strains into crowded areas, multifarious occupations and conflicting opinions.

Age expects to find our manners as formless as our environment. And it does find them so. I can remember how carefully, for example, the Ladies of the Sacred Heart taught us the correct attitude for the drawing-room. I can see us walking gingerly across those highly polished floors, seating ourselves with carefully distributed weight, finally achieving a pose which in retrospect looks very Egyptian-monumental, but which at the time indicated ease combined with a determination never never to admit the presence of knees by crossing them. I can see, too, that long refectory with two rows of young-ladies-in-training, each one carefully eliminating her elbows. And the very first thing we found when we emerged into ‘the world’ was that every beautiful lady in the most lustrant of the illustrations not only owned knees, but crossed them, and the lady who was so beautiful that she burst out on to the cover, invariably had elbows, which she rested on a table.

There are only two conditions which keep formal manners alive. One is the importance of ceremonial, — such a symbol of the vicarious performance of leisure for example as the uncut finger nails of the high-class Chinese, the necessity, in short, for impressing others in order to maintain a caste or a cult. The other is an intense belief in one’s personal dignity.

Of the many elements which have gone to wipe out both these conditions for the young, none, I believe, is more powerful than the substitution of an objective interest in which young men and young women are equally engaged, for the purely personal interest which but a short time ago was the basis of all intercourse between the sexes. They grow used to being together without awareness of one another’s personality. You may see it in the laboratory: young men and young women checking results by test tube or microscope. You may see it again on the links or on the tennis court.

Or it may be a September day, all sapphires and pure light, when the wind is like a teasing school-boy and every boat that sets a prankish sail does so to test the hearts that laugh at courage. More things go down than ships and men. Many a fine distinction, many a delicate phrase, many a pretty dignity—and Kit and Tom emerge.

Is it because we are becoming more socialized, that we approach in tone a state of society where people cry ‘Comrade’ to each other? Certainly we do not feel that our manners must support a caste, and to the younger generation nothing among its contemporaries is so sure a mark of an ‘unarrived’ person as any suspicion that an effort of the sort is being made.

Almost too defiantly perhaps youth longs to make a sacrifice of everything to Revealment. It is perfectly aware of the genuineness of that greater dignity in its parents and yet it cannot help a secret feeling that the old-fashioned manner covered up something just for the sake of the covering. They believed in closed parlors, in heavy hangings at the windows, in tidies, and feather-dusters. They desired above all things should ‘look nice.’

Just as their manners were genuine for them, our manners are genuine for us. We do not believe in concealment. We want a great many windows all wide open. We have burned up tidies and heavy curtains. A feather-duster will soon be as interesting a domestic antiquity as a warming-pan. If the vacuum cleaner is being mended we leave the dust right where we can find it when we are ready to clean up.

It is not only among people of the same age that there is greater frankness. Fathers are talking more plainly to their sons; mothers to their daughters. We are beginning to see that the eighth deadly sin and the worst of all is Ignorance. Many of our mothers were held in restraint by a sort of a general terror of they knew not what. We are not afraid to go ahead, because we know all the implications of each step. The result is significantly a boldness of manner, founded on a consciousness that we have nothing to conceal.

The rising generation has heard of ‘fine reserve’ and ‘noble reticence,’ but it refuses to believe in them as ends in themselves. If they are to form a sort of spiritual antimacassar, concealing worn places in the mental furniture, — unworthy suspicions, base unbeliefs, false interpretations — they would better be thrown into the flames of self-examination. In Mr. Galsworthy’s Fraternity, the situation is completely suggested by Stephen’s jest: ‘If young people will reveal their ankles, they’ll soon have no ankles to reveal.’

A woman of an older generation, a gentlewoman, whose life has brought her into contact with the young people of two coeducational universities, admitted this greater freedom and informality. But she got from it a hopeful interpretation: —

‘I find greater frankness—and more purity!’ she said; ‘less putting girls upon a pedestal, — and less smashing them afterwards!’

In short these manners, crudely, perhaps, are of a piece with a passionate belief in its own intellectual honesty, which is to the new generation the most essential element in its self-respect. They are of a piece with a determined seeking after truth, whithersoever the argument may lead; with a conviction that uncleanness is the child of ignorance, and that once the white light of frank simplicity is turned upon the darker corners of the mind, much that was once thought a moral dust heap will turn out to be but floating scintillant particles, soon dissipated. The younger generation is ashamed to be ashamed.

II.

If from a half-conscious longing for recognizing only the big and strong elements, our manners lose something, they are in this respect symbolic of another characteristic of the spiritual life of the young. It would be folly to deny that many of the older religious sanctions which had broken down for our parents have not been reërected by their children. But from that wreck of the religious sense which followed closely upon the scientific movement of the middle nineteenth century, those children are reclaiming for themselves two powerful principles. One is a broad but sincere acceptance of those spiritual beauties common to all beliefs, and the other, the socialization of its system of ethics.

‘I believe we are just as earnest!’ said a College Secretary of the Young Woman’s Christian Association in one of the largest of our Universities; ‘but it is often hard to convince our elders because we are broader in our definitions. We can have a good time without doing wrong. We can combine religion and pleasure.’

Because we wear our philosophies easily, because we have enlarged our inheritance from some unknown drop of foreign blood, or from our spreading out into warmer places than the chilly rocks where our Puritan forefathers ‘rescued this land from the Devil,’ because we can jest even at things we secretly hold sacred, we are often inexplicable to our parents. It was not a part of their manners so to do. And it is hard for many of them to believe in our sincerity when we do it. And yet in our own extraordinary fashion we are probably reconstructing under new forms some resemblance to the light-hearted singleness of primitive Christianity.

‘These early Roman Christians received the Gospel message, a command to love all men, with a certain joyous simplicity. The image of the Good Shepherd is blithe and gay beyond the gentlest shepherd of Greek mythology,’ Miss Addams says, as she pauses at her fiftieth milestone to interpret that life into which she has read so deeply; … ‘I believe there is a distinct turning among many young men and women toward this simple acceptance of Christ’s message.’

Left free in our choice by the rulelessness of our upbringing, early allowed to conclude that there was in every creed much that could never be assuredly proven, we have come to judge creeds by their output in action and to unite upon lines of conduct rather than upon lines of belief. Religious determinations which a few years ago were followed simply because they were the recognized aims of definite sects, which one had ‘joined,’ on quite other grounds, now unite the offspring of many different creeds or of no creed at all.

Missionary enthusiasm for example caused about four thousand college students, most of them undergraduates, to give up their Christmas holidays for the sake of attending a recent convention of the Student Volunteer Movement. Last year four thousand three hundred and seventy-seven more young college men and college women offered themselves as missionaries to the foreign field than could be accepted. Growing with extraordinary rapidity in membership, in financial ability, in enthusiasm, this is a young people’s movement; its very founders and its great names are the names of persons still in their early thirties.

And yet note that the content of this movement is a content which has always been most intimately identified with certain dogmatic systems. The younger generation takes out of the separate theologies one object and unites on that.

One can hardly note such facts as these, and others like them, and still maintain that the older sanctions have not their followers and their thousands of followers among the younger generation.

III.

The difference of emphasis, however, which distinguishes the younger from the elder time, is that ours is an emphasis not upon form but upon content.

The younger generation is far more concerned with what you have to say than with how you wish to say it. It is not much interested in personal impression, general theory. It is profoundly interested in first-hand studies carefully made, in new or more vigorous interpretations of well-known facts. The ‘mob of gentlemen who write with ease’ is tailing the gray beaver and the hoop-skirt around the corner while the band just passing is playing for the man who writes because he has something to say.

You expect that such a shift of stress as this would profoundly affect our theories of the proper education to give our children. And it has so affected it. No better illustration could be made of the difference between two generations than is to be found in a comparison of the questions our fathers had to answer when they sat down to write an examination in geography with those which confront the children of to-day.

‘Why does the St. Lawrence never have floods?’

‘Give causes for the difference in climate between England and New England.’

‘Why has New York become the greatest commercial centre in the United States?’

‘Why, why, why?’ that is the question we constantly set before our children. Not ‘define,’ not ‘name,’ no rhymed lists of capital cities and principal rivers, no ‘what sea lies east of Cochin China?’ or ‘In what direction does the St. Lawrence flow?’

In most of the comparisons of our time with another we are at one painful disadvantage. Our fathers confute us by combining what they remember of themselves with what they guess about us. But in these often made and quite unfounded assertions that the youth of to-day is deficient in the three R’s because he is proficient in a fourth R — Raffia, — we can reply to their personal impressions with a few actual facts. For several schoolmasters, smarting under these stings, have been at pains to poultice themselves and us. Proceeding in the modern experimental method, they have first unearthed such monuments of the alleged golden age in American spelling as could be found in their several school safes. Under conditions designed to promote the greatest fairness, if they did not even put our children at a disadvantage, those same questions in geography and history, those same spelling lists, were dusted and inserted into the intellectual quick of the infant minds of Springfield in Massachusetts, Norwich in Connecticut, and Cleveland in Ohio.

The average gain in efficiency in spelling of the children of to-day was from 4.5 to 9.6 per cent, the combined average gain in efficiency in arithmetic, history, geography and grammar, was 20 per cent.

In other words, in spite of the fact that we do not apparently care so much about these things as our fathers did we actually do them better. And I believe that it would be safe to make the same assertion for our knowledge of the classics, although I could not so easily prove it.

You can however prove for yourself how different is the standard of work required in the classical departments of our universities from that of a few decades ago. And it is only fair to remember that of the armies of youth who on entering college desert the humanities for the utilities, a large proportion have already done much of the Latin which would have been called ‘college work’ by our Fathers. There are so many of us who have done much more than that, ‘even in the Latin or the Greek,’ that we do not pride ourselves on having read only Virgil and Cicero. We forget to mention it and thereby lose much credit. To have read so much was a fair Latinity to our grandfathers in America. But Germany has caught our youth by the wing and applies the grindstone of the cuneiform syllabary of Cyprian or the velar q to the edge of our classical appetite. In other words unless we specialize in the classics we aren’t classical. Even when we do specialize we are not always classical in the old sense. As soon as we specialize we begin to become scientific.

In this respect we are perfectly consistent. Education, man’s greatest luminant, seems in another aspect to be the shadow of the life of man; — it is always just one lap behind, panting after life in a never-ending race to catch up with life’s always accumulating, changing demands.

In other words, the knowledge of the time that is past was as the life of that time. Our knowledge is as our life. In place of the few books which it was serviceable to have in one’s private collection, we have a card on the circulating library, where any sort of book leaps conformably to hand to meet our need of information or to share our hours of ease. In place of the three simple professions which had, since Adam delved, adorned the life of our grandfathers, all life has become a profession, commerce an art. Our souls demand study, and there are psychological laboratories; typhoid oppresses us, and there are bacteriological laboratories; we eat, and there are special laboratories for the chemical analysis of foods; animal life is all about us, and there are biological laboratories; we read, and there is a workshop for library science. Physical science impinges upon chemistry; here is an electrical furnace! We must have newspapers; here is a school of journalism! Men live in groups apparently under the dominance of certain forces; we will begin studies leading to a true establishment of Sociology!

Through elementary school and high school giving hours to make wooden toys or gingham aprons as well as to Greek and mathematics; through colleges giving hours to horticulture or cookery as well as to early Gothic; through all the seethe of struggling elements, is there any one clue which one may hold fast to bring one safe to daylight? I think there is. Just as our manners are adapted to the newer thought of Pureness in Revealment; just as we unite on the content rather than on the form of religious teaching, so our education ministers to a society which feels that its greatest interest is in investigation. We need to acquire the power of independent thought. For that purpose there are many things as valuable as a remembrance of the fact that the genitive of supellex is not supellicis, but supellectilis.

IV.

The demand that we should get our intellectual nourishment from one source is of a price with the demand that we shall get our spiritual nourishment from one source. We are glad that the day is gone which believed in only one avenue to culture; we are glad that the day is come which believes that in the house of beauty there are many mansions.

Some people seem to look at life through a sort of mental opera-glass, which, when directed upon the extraordinary range of experience surrounding the youth of to-day, encircles only those elements which are debasing or demoralizing, which permits them to see in our manners only their element of vulgarity, in our spiritual life only the quality of negation, in our education only a lack of discipline. Still more restricted does that encirclement appear to us when it finds in our drama only the lower form of vaudeville, in our art only the ‘Sunday Sup.’

It is not grandmother, it is the young mamma who hurries to the front porch to tear from the morning newspaper its brilliant stuffing. It is the young mamma who believers that such pictures are ‘unmoral.’ Indeed, one of the most successful Sunday editors in the country asserts that the ‘Sunday Sup’ is a ‘circulation-getter’ among the mature of the crowded quarters rather than among the American-born of tender years.

The Sunday Supplement however is a fact. It is a disagreeable fact. But more significant we think is the fact that the simple performances of our daily lives can be carried on constantly under increasingly beautiful conditions. Children may see cheap and ephemeral pictures. Salvation lies in this, that they are ephemeral. But those same children sit long hours in school rooms hung with fine reproductions of Corot or of Millet, or set with the winged Niké dimly wonderful against a background carefully studied to give just the proper value. Their hands are trained to execute what their minds are trained to work out, in color, in pottery, in textiles. Even the children of careless or busy parents have their chance to receive the finer, nobler impressions when their class is taken on little ‘gallery tours’ in the great centres; when they can see and talk over a ‘loan exhibition’ sent out to the smaller communities.

As a work of pure art compare ‘the little red school house’ with such public schools as those of Mr. Perkins in Chicago, Mr. Sturgis in Boston or Mr. Ittner in St. Louis. Compare the carefully modeled shafts from which depend the lights in our finer streets with the T-shaped lamp posts of a few years ago. Compare the brown stone horrors of the seventies, the ornate furniture, the involuted draperies, the flowered carpets, the fringes, the tassels, with a domestic art based upon the idea that form must follow function, with our adaptations of the best in our native colonial houses, with our simple lines, our spare furnishings, our devotion to eh gradual acquisition of the money for a really good rug. When you have made that comparison, do you conclude that public taste is really degenerating? Do you not rather see that there is at work a new spirit in American art, a spirit which allies it to the brightest time of the art of other countries, the spirit of youth which is one with that spirit of joy without which the best in art is never born? Moreover, the younger generation, listening to the Friday afternoon concert of the Theodore Thomas orchestra, — as it does, — or to the Boston Symphony, — as it odes, — or to the Cincinnati festival chorus, — as it does, — is having its taste trained and satisfied by Bach and Strauss, by Beethoven and Brahms. And listening to those unworded revealings of the human soul, the younger generation is aware that in half a million homes throughout the country these same strains, less true perhaps, but existent still in some resemblance to their first great artistry, are heard and heard again.

More than a handful of the younger generation are the supporters, more than a handful are the admirers of Volpe, of Horatio Parker, of Arthur Foote, of Chadwick, of Damrosch, Grover, Stock, Lutkin, and Hadley. Where in the generation of our father and mothers there were at most but two cities in America where the best music was constantly interpreted by competent musicians, there are now at least a dozen. Musical Art or Choral Societies, string quartettes, full orchestras in New York and Boston, — yes, but also in Seattle, in Chicago, in St. Louis, in Minneapolis, St. Paul, Cincinnati, and—with occasional interruptions—in Pittsburg! Add to this the children’s choruses, singing really good music extraordinarily well; add to this such an organization as the A Cappella Choir of Northwestern University; add to it sustained musical departments in almost every university of consequence, and one reaches some suggestion of the reason why many of the greatest singers now before the public are Americans, why even ‘Herr This’ and ‘M. That’ in Berlin and Paris, with waiting lists of pupils and an acknowledged position in the musical life on the continent, are ‘Old Chicago boys,’ or ‘Used to live in Albany.’

V.

It is, however, confusing to dismiss in a paragraph the total effect of our aesthetic surroundings on the younger public, because there is not one public, there are a score. And true as this may be of the artistic or the musical public it is quite as true of the dramatic. Not only can we get the rug, the picture, the jewel, the preserved fruit, the bit of lace, — from north, from south, from next state, from far country; that this one, that that one, momentarily needs; but there is also a commercial response to the dramatic tastes of every section of the community.

Those who demand cheap and vulgarizing exhibitions may have their tastes satisfied just as they always have had them satisfied, but with the greater competence made possible by the superiority of our commercial organization. But those who demand a fine interpretation of the best plays can find the best plays also. It is completely unfair to the influences which bear upon the youth of to-day, to turn a jaundiced gaze upon one of these and to disregard entirely the other. We have head that our mothers and fathers spent some of their time in laughing at the extraordinary humor of such lines as ‘I learn, on inquiry, that cows do not give sardines,’ when lisped off by the elder Sothern, or in fascinated attention to the writings of the comical Mr. Muldoon about the legs of a high chair, as well as in attending upon occasional performances of Booth or Barrett, And we call attention in turn to the fact that we derive some entertainment from The Blue Bird, and The Faun and Peter Pan as well as from Mme. Sherry, from Herod and Everyman as well as from The Girl in the Taxi, and that both the scenically glorious Shakespeare of Miss Marlowe and the scenically barren Shakespeare of Mr. Ben Greet have been applauded with some enthusiasm in recent years.

It is not merely the varying tastes of different publics which are met, but the varying moods of the individual. And to the young it seems a misfortune for you if you have not varying moods. Granted that the spectacle be clean, — it seems to them a misfortune if you cannot get enjoyment out of many differing kinds of dramatic effort. You cannot yourself be close to all sorts of the wonderful ranging life of to-day; but you can get just a little closer to it through the theatre. And this is the point at which vaudeville, the best vaudeville, makes its appeal to us. Remember, not all of us by any means are devotees of the ‘top-liners.’ But don’t despair of us if we are!

While we pause to observe that we did not invent the entertainment, we may nevertheless also insist that there is variety in vaudeville. You may thrill to an act of daring, or take your joy in that magnificent display of human physique which indicates not only skill but years of abstemiousness which would do credit to an anchorite. You may hear the sort of ‘stunts’ that good musicians do when they lay aside their professional manner and play with their art among their friends. Isn’t it worth noticing that the house-filling popularity of the ‘most beautiful woman in the world’ is equaled by that of a serious, uncompromising study of real life such as Mr. J. M. Patterson’s Dope or by that of such an artistic presentation of a social message as Mr. George Beban’s The Sign of the Rose?

The element in it all which is terrifyingly new to our discouraged ancestors is that we who ought to be the children of light are enjoying every bit of it. Of course we are! and rightly! It mirrors back to us our environment. Just so the great Elizabethan drama lived through the dreary days of Anne even to our own time, most surely because it was Elizabethan. It was alive. It was written by live people about live people. It reproduced its own environment through all classical disguise. It was as good and as bad as itself. Our drama seems to us to do the same thing. Paid in Full, The Fourth Estate, The Man of the Hour, — you know them and the many others like them, — studies of our day, they may be called. They may be called studies of our environment. And in that respect they seem not only to be unlike the drama of a generation ago but to reflect and to present therein a similar unlikeness in ourselves.

VI.

The complete lack of recognition of the public point of view is to us one of the most amazing disclosures as we pursue our researches into the history of the era just preceding us. More menacing, it seems to us, than individual greed, than poor little aldermen taking a job for brother-in-law in consideration of a ‘right’ voice on a gas franchise; more menacing than poor little legislators ‘holding-up’ the rich gun-club’s game-preserve bill till a few dollars trickle into their silly little pockets; more menacing than any number of examples of individual ‘graft,’ is the widespread existence of that social attitude which saw in politics only a ‘cess-pool’; which placed the rewards of private business above those of public service’ which would make our government he handmaid of special privilege—in short, the social attitude into which we were born.

Here acres of state land quietly handed over to a steel mill, there a city’s lake front given over to a railroad; here a stream—of all the wonderful universe, one would think, most sacred gift to all, — poisoned its length, there the very air noxious with unnecessary vapors; forests and mines which should have been the bread of the future children of America made the wine of the women of the Riviera, — these are the conditions, into which we were born. These are the conditions for which the noble Romans of another generation are responsible. Having made these conditions they tremble to think how we are going to face them.

Our forbears, preoccupied with ideals of individual beauty, seems to us to have failed to realize their environment. We resent an individual virtue which exists in the midst of social wrong. Therefore we resent that interpretation of our conduct which calls us individualistic. For it seems to us that never before has a sense of social ethics been so widespread.

There are various signs you may read if you doubt that statement. Try for example the one-time heard argument that because a man is good to his family he will probably make a good United States Senator; you will arouse the rude and violent laughter of to-day.

One illustration may be found in a recent incident in the newspaper business. A letter of Mr. Edmund Clarence Stedman, written during the war to his wife, and printed last fall for the first time, told of having received a check from the manufacturer of a certain cannon, and says that he ‘will boom this cannon in the future.’ In its editorial comment, the Chicago Tribune pointed out how far the ideals of the newspaper profession had progressed since the sixties, that a man of Mr. Stedman’s undoubted honesty and character could, without a thought, do what no self-respecting reporter could do to-day—and retain his self-respect.

VII.

The talk of ‘temperament’ and ‘self-expression’ was much more characteristic of those who were young at the feet of Whitman than it is of those who are young at the feet of Mr. Dooley. The test of effect upon individual character was then the only test by which to try even social conduct. For like an unperfumed rose, that penitential spirit which led to countless mystical expressions in the middle ages, grew up again unlovely in the individualistic interpretations of earlier America. It survives among us in that attitude of mind which demands a certain drawing-room posture partly because it is uncomfortable, not because it is beautiful; which prescribes certain studies because they are disciplinary, not because they teach anything worth knowing; which finds something intrinsically valuable in cleaning lamps, even though the room may be better lighted by pressing a button; which cannot believe that you really want to make the world better unless you have a private individual tear to shed at each of its miseries.

For a mediæval saint to wash the feet of twelve poor old men was a sanctified act because it cleansed not the feet of the old men, but the soul of the saint. If Saint-of-To-day were to be assigned that task his entire thought would be the better preparation of those twelve old men for their next necessary walk, with a mental reservation in favor of so constituting society that it would never be necessary for some one else to do it for them.

We are glad that the time is gone which in the words of Simon Patten ‘endeavored to extract nobility of character out of domestic maladjustments.’ We are going to use for social service the leisure created by business organization and by mechanical invention.

We are perfectly willing that you call this a ‘sense of duty,’ — this newly awakened social conscience. In fact we don’t care in the least what name you call it by. You may come as a Socialist, a single-taxer, a neighborhood-improver, an art-leaguer, a charity-organizer. You need not have ‘a passion of Christ-like pity,’ you may merely think it is better business policy. It doesn’t, to the youngsters, make very much difference by what name you choose to be called, — any more than it made any difference in what order you entered a drawing-room, or whether you studied mathematics or bacteriology, — provided, provided — you get to making life more livable for most people. We demand a sort of race-patriotism.

Patriotism to the human race will include the old patriotism and the old religion in one. No age of religion ever recoiled more from blood, ever came closer to a conception of ultimate pace, than this age. No age has produced greater martyrs to religion than this age has dedicated to humanity.

And you think that the broadening notion of service has not its glories of individual character, that the new has not its martyrs like the old? I like to think of the woman who has given up wealth and lives meanly, willingly enduring not only material discomforts but to be misjudged, insulted and abused, in order to give to those social causes in which she believes not only her money but the influence of her extraordinary personality. I might mention her name. But she has many names. She is in every city.

I like to think of Lazear, — thirty-four years old, happily married, widely loved, at the gate of his profession, scientist and soldier, embracing death gloriously, hurrying to meet it, that he might rip but by a little thread this veil of ignorance which so enshrouds mankind. To us he seems hardly less glorious because his life was given not for the sake of single creed nor for the hope of future unspeakable reward, but simply that other men might know one fact, — one fact about one disease — simply that other men might even in a small degree come closer to a right relationship to their environment. For however light-heartedly this generation may try to take its fundamental philosophies it is always conscious of the underlying pathos of its position. It cannot name the port whither, it seems, our bark is set. With the ship under full sail our fathers first tore up the sailing orders and then steered into uncharted seas. This generation, with no sailing orders, voluntarily must unite for charting those seas. It must be for some other generation to bring the ship to port.